If you try to take Camille Paglia seriously, despite the occasional insight you might find along the way, in the end it’s impossible to avoid the suspicion that you’ve made a category error.

Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars by Camille Paglia. Pantheon, 224 pages, $30.

By Harvey Blume.

It’s no fun to take Camille Paglia seriously. Not rewarding. It could be the effort is, as someone remarked similarly about Slavoj Žižek, a category error. But in thinking about the opening pages of Paglia’s new book, it occurs to me that there is a simple way of describing her. Her pronouncements about art, literature, and assorted other topics over the course of her career (including, back in her heyday, when she regularly mounted a salon.com soapbox, strictures about how Madonna should sing and Hillary Clinton dress) have this in common: behind them there is a demagogue trying to get out.

Camille Paglia needs to rule. Only her dictates can save us from all that is eating away at civilization as she insists that we know it. Only she can defeat the feminists she despises (as opposed to one or two she spares); only she can rescue literature from literary theory (she pronounces “LacanFoucaultDerrida” as if it were one dirty word, the name of a Francophone tumor preying on the American mind).

In the new book, she wants to rescue us from the “vertigo” of digital distraction and social media. She complains in her introduction that “the genre of painting has lost its primacy and authority.” For this she blames the “tragic complacency” of the curators and directors of major art institutions. She will cut through that exhausted curatoriat and help, indeed, force us, “to relearn how to see.”

It doesn’t give Paglia a second’s pause that perhaps painting, along with sculpture, has lost its traditional role not because the likes of Phillip Montebello, for example, ex-director of the Metropolitan Museum, who was a slacker or a dolt—he presided, among other things, over the creation of a superb Greco-Roman gallery, though of course Paglia herself would have done better—but because other visual arts, from the beginning of the twentieth century on, have come into being. Photography, film, television, and now an overflow of digital possibilities all lay claim to talent and attention.

Her response to complexity is simple: rave. Not to rave is not to care. So she raves about the turn from painting to other media—what the despised postmodernists of Paris might have helpfully called the decenteredness of painting. Had she read and absorbed Marshal Mcluhan she might be less shocked, yes shocked, that the electronic age has provided so much competition to the paintbrush and the pedestal.

Had she read and absorbed Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), she might appreciate that media transitions are not doomed to be zero sum. According to Benjamin, yes, something precious is lost when a painting is stripped, by reproduction, of what he called its “aura,” its one-of-a-kind, almost human presence in space and time. But something no less valuable is gained when, by dint of the same technological revolution, film reveals motion as never seen before. Benjamin compares the painter to a magician and the cameraman to a surgeon and does not feel compelled to choose between their arts. His thoughts on this subject remain enchanting and substantial. Both Mcluhan and Benjamin were moved to reflect deeply about new media, as, too, was Plato, when, in the Phaedrus, he wondered about the harm that would be caused to an oral tradition by the new medium of alphabetic text.

These thinkers left plenty to think about. They did not just rave.

***

I had the unpleasant experience of interviewing Camille Paglia in 1995. In preparation for an interview, I try to immerse myself as fully as I can in the subject’s work. Most people like talking about their work with an informed, sympathetic, not necessarily uncritical interlocutor. Not Camille Paglia. I can’t help but chuckle, at this remove, when I think of her summarily saying: “Stop talking to me. It gives me a headache. Just ask questions. I give answers.”

I felt insulted, almost walked off and left her with her headache, but heeled. The results were instructive.

Paglia told me she had been inspired by psychedelics and psychedelic culture and liked to call her style of writing “psychedelic criticism” since there was a lot of “reverb” in it, just like in “acid rock.” She affirmed that she herself had never had a psychedelic experience, had never, in brief, tripped. She nevertheless felt entitled to speak for psychedelic experience—that “revolutionary, hallucinatory, and mystic way of seeing”—better than those who had indulged, better, by far, she opined, than Grateful Dead fans parading around in their “tie-died tee-shirts.” For Paglia, a contact high—but not from Deadheads—was all the revelation she needed.

She confirmed, as well, that she had never participated in sadomasochistic sex. Still, to my mind, the best bit in her diffuse Sexual Personae was the chapter on Rousseau, in which she managed to correlate his sex life (as expressed in his Confessions) to his politics. As a boy, Jean-Jacques was regularly draped over the lap of his lovely governess for spankings he came to relish. As an adult, he saw women as potential spankers and himself as an aspiring spankee. Rousseau is best known for writing: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” But in his sexual fantasies, he kept some chains around. Paglia, to be sure, had no firsthand experience of this type to draw on. What she owes to Jean-Jacques is her eye-opening, contact spank.

Something of the same approach—a curious bifurcation hovering between disingenuousness and hypocrisy—marks Glittering Images. “The arts are fighting a rearguard action,” she writes, “their very survival at stake.” The minds of children are especially at risk and demand “rescue from the torrential stream of flickering images, which addict them to seductive distractions.”

How peculiar then—how typically Paglia—that this book, which is meant to be a sort of primer on art history and to serve as an example for grade school curricula, concludes with a prolonged gush of enthusiasm for George Lucas’s Revenge of the Sith (2005). Paglia has no end of praise for this, the sixth and most digital entry in the Star Wars saga, in which, as she sees it, George Lucas “closed the gap between art and technology.”

It somehow doesn’t bother her that the movie is embedded completely, as she notes, in “the gargantuan cosmos of Star Wars cartoons, video games, novels, handbooks, action figures, plastic kits, and Web sites.” Nor that it makes a substantial contribution to the “torrential stream of flickering images” that can disturb and derange young minds.

The tale is told that Alec Guinness, aka Obi-Wan Kenobi, once agreed to give an autograph to a young fan only on condition that the child gave up watching Star Wars. Obsessive viewing was the hypnotic dark side of the force. Other things—books, paintings, films—deserved attention.

Paglia herself was apparently never visited by Obi-Wan in his shimmering ghostly form to caution her against ending a book on the history of art with Star Wars. Would she have listened? Probably not. For her, art history, which began millennia ago, as per Glittering Images, in Pharaonic Egypt, ends in our time with the $135 million Revenge of the Sith.

If you try to take Camille Paglia seriously, despite the occasional insight you might find along the way, in the end it’s impossible to avoid the suspicion that you’ve made a category error.

***

“This book,” she says about Glittering Images, “was motivated by my dismay at the open animosity toward art and artists that I have heard on American AM talk radio over the past two decades.” Longtime Paglia readers can confirm that she is an avid listener to AM talk radio. A 1999 column she wrote for salon.com hinged on the following: “Within 24 hours of the opening of the present show, local radio talk shows in New York and Philadelphia were seething with allegations about the Jewish presence on the Brooklyn Museum’s board and administration.”

The show in question to was the second at the Brooklyn Museum to arouse furor, including threats by then mayor Rudolf Giuliani to defund the borough’s popular museum. The piece most offensive to Paglia, the mayor, and AM talk radio callers, was “The Holy Virgin Mary” by Nigerian/British painter Chris Ofili.

This was a dark-skinned Madonna on a canvas that included floating images of female genitalia. Some people seethed to find the Virgin in dark-toned, Nubian featured, non-virginal contexts. This can’t but bring to mind how often Muslims seethe when they detect what they take to be off-color representations of Muhammad. One reason not to push this analogy too far, though, is that Ofili, unlike the hacks behind the current, stupidly offensive, anti-Muslim video, is in fact a talented artist who was not out to insult Mary, though that would be well within his rights, so much as to Africanize and sexualize her. Ofili used cakes of varnished elephant dung as stands for the canvas. Elephant dung can have positive connotations in African contexts. But try explaining that on New York/Philadelphia AM Talk Radio.

Did Paglia try? Can you imagine her calling in to reason with the seething? No, when she turned on the radio, she enjoyed a contact seethe and wrote a column that debuted under the inflammatory title “Why are a Jewish collector and a Jewish museum director promoting anti-Catholic art?” This was Paglia’s inner demagogue unleashed at its most vulgar—and unforgiveable.

As for the extinction event Paglia feels is threatening art, and that Glittering Images was written to forestall, it’s worth noting that as of this writing MoMA is proposing to stay open seven days a week instead of six in order to accommodate a crush of visitors whose number has doubled in the last eight years. We have multiple choices, then. There are museums and galleries that seem, contra Paglia, to be thriving. Or you can go along with the flow of AM talk radio, never daring to contradict. Or you can download Revenge of the Sith, ignore Alec Guinness’s admonition, and follow along yet again as Anakin Skywalker completes his journey to the dark side.

You can even do all three.